CFP: Essays in Culture and Irreversibility (5/30/05; collection)

Call for Papers: Essays in Culture and Irreversibility (Collection).Proposals due 30 May 2005; completed essays likely due September 2005.

Submissions are sought for a collection of papers that has attractedstrong interest from a press. Essays should address culturalrepresentations of experience that are not amenable to metaphors ofreturn, advent, or re-collection. Numerous attempts have been made tocharacterize the modes of intelligent experience. These have includedefforts to locate conceptual apparatus that underlie apperception,metaphors that lend narrative meaning to experience, or socio-culturalstructures that enable the detection of historical significance, toname a few. But such conceptualizations often end up revealing amessianism or other teleology subtending the human experience ofhistory. Work remains to be pursued on the sense, knowledge, orexperience of irreversibility. Importantly, this experience isdifferent from nostalgia, which derives its charge from (and isunderwritten by) a fantasy of return. And it is incompatible withexistential concern with memory centered on the subject as a kind ofcollector, anchor, or focus of historical significance. If messianicstructures posit a future to justify the present (if by way of thepast), this collection is devoted to examining experience from theperspective of its rearview mirror.

Papers should contribute to an analysis of the experience ofirretrievability, inaccessibility, irreparability, irremediability,irrevocability, or any other form of irreversibility. The purview ofthis collection spans the concerns of several disciplines, includingphilosophy, ethics, literature, history, art history, linguistics,religion, physics, politics, and sociology, to name a few.

Questions, problems, or perspectives that might be considered include,but are by no means limited to, the following:1. What are the outlines or history of a theory of irreversibility?2. How is irreversibility represented?3. How does the experience of irretrievability take shape as a culturalform?4. How does recognition of irrevocability force a reconceptualizationof the experiences of "looking backward" or "looking forward" away fromtheir respective meanings within a progressive understanding ofhistory?5. What sort of challenge (if any) does irreversibility pose toteleology?6. What kinds of politics are compatible with a theory of history asirremediability? Is such a theory of history radical or conservative?7. Which authors would be included in a literary history ofirreversibility?8. What does a morality or ethics grounded in the recognition ofhistorical irreversibility-i.e., of choices or decisions-look like?9. Is the worldview that attends a conviction of irreversibilityinherently pessimistic, or can it be optimistic?10. What role does a phenomenology of irreversibility play incontemporary culture?11. How does irreversibility affect the current socio-politicaldominance of identity-based thinking?

Abstracts of about 500 words or so should be sent by 30 May 2005 to BenSchreier at formstone_at_mindspring.com (MSWord attachments preferred) or,if necessary, Department of English (MC 162), University of Illinois atChicago, 601 S. Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60607. Complete papers willprobably be due in September.